1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of delivery of multimedia content over a variety of networks. More specifically, it pertains to multimedia servers which service many clients simultaneously for the delivery of multimedia content which is used and played back at each client. It addresses methods for determining optimal delivery rates to each client and methods for determining whether new clients may be accepted without diminishing the quality of service to existing clients.
2. Status of the Prior Art
In the history of multimedia program delivery, some in the industry have long advocated the use of large client-side buffers and faster-than-real-time content delivery over a network as offering the best of all worlds: a jitter-free viewing experience and a cost-effective utilization of the network resources at hand. Few systems, however, go very far in addressing how to schedule clients or a method for accepting new clients. Real-time systems, often known as streaming systems, can schedule new clients in a very simple manner—if sufficient bandwidth remains for the added real-time stream, then the client may be accepted. However, such systems do not maximize the number of simultaneous clients. On the other hand, faster than real-time delivery, sometimes known as store-and-forward systems, opens up the possibility for more flexible scheduling procedures to control and optimize the number of simultaneous clients while ensuring a high level of quality of service.
The methods for such call acceptance and flow modulation that have been proposed in the prior art have been largely ad-hoc and also incomplete. These have been ad-hoc in the sense that there has been no guiding rationale for their selection from among many possible and potentially superior alternatives. The methods have also been incomplete insofar as they did not address the question of whether any given incoming request for service should be accepted or denied. Video-on-demand systems, or more generally, any system in which a multimedia server is designed to serve multiple clients over a network to deliver bounded content, can benefit from the use of such flow modulation techniques and call acceptance procedures.
Optimal Content Flow Modulation
One time-honored way of designing methods of the class required here is to re-cast the problem to be solved as an optimization problem, in which one seeks to maximize a designated value function moment-by-moment, subject to a set of real-world operational constraints which will typically vary over time. Accordingly, given a set of clients and associated sessions, an optimal delivery procedure continuously establishes content flow rates from the content server to each of its clients so as to maximize aggregate value according to the governing value function.
This approach holds several advantages: 1) optimization problems are well understood, and are tractable by a large and diverse collection of computational methods; 2) if it exists, a global solution that is obtained is arguably optimal by construction, and thus superior or equal to all other.
The present invention teaches the method of optimizing two particular value functions:                1) total data delivered (maximize throughput).        2) total delivery charges (maximize charges).        
The first value function does not distinguish one customer from another and will deliver as much data as possible from server to clients irrespective of the characteristics of the latter. The second value function favors the service of high paying customers. It can easily be seen that the first function is a special case of the second one whereby all clients are charged equally.
As will be seen in this disclosure, optimizing for these functions and identifying the necessary constraints requires a new and unique perspective that is specifically designed for the multimedia environment. Moreover, the disclosed methods are specifically designed to account for and accommodate real-world scenarios of today's networks. Consequently many variations of the method are presented to accommodate various scenarios.